One of the things about Marketing ICE that really sets us apart is our community.  Paid members get access to the community where they can ask questions about videos. The really great part is that this information is available to you when you become a member because you can read through the old forum postings and search the forum.

I thought this was a particular important post.  One of our members is asking about "affiliate marketing" and wants to know if he is wasting his time with this affiliate program or not. 

I just realized that I set up a couple old blogger blogs back when I was just playing around. But, they have both been around for a while. They probably don't have any page rank, but I can at least set them up with a domain name etc http://internetmarketingsecrets.blogspot.com/ http://whoisfabiomoro.blogspot.com/

I'm still working on trying to change my descriptions on my site to make them original. Honestly, I feel like I'm not getting anywhere. But, then again I was told that Google puts new sites in the sandbox for about 6 months. I've been at it for just under 3. I dunno…do you think a site like mine…www.healthdynamite.com has potential? It doesn't have an integrated shopping cart. Instead it goes to the vendor page when you hit the buy button. So, because I am an affiliate, I only get a small percentage. I wonder if that percentage will add up to anything significant? Then again, I've heard that people can make good money as an affiliate.

Oh well, enough babble. I'll try to work on setting up those blogs for pay per post so I can make a buck…maybe rent. Do they have Google page rank? How do I tell? Wow a lot of questions.

The sandbox is real, but it is also entirely possible to get a site ranking well even if it is a new site. You just won't get it ranking well for a phrase that has a lot of competition, because the sand box will hurt you. (Jack and Mark can comment more on the Sandbox)

As far as checking the page rank simply go to the home page for each blog.  If you have the SearchStatus extension for Firefox? It will show your alexa ranking and google page rank.  You can see a picture in the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox web browser which shows your rankings graphically, and you can hold the mouse over a ranking to see the numeric ranking:

As far as making money as an affiliate… It's pretty easy to figure out.

What is the percentage you get paid on your sales? Simply figure out how much you want to make…

So if you make say 5% on your sales. And you want to make $1,000 a month. You'd need to do $20,000 a month in sales in order to make $1,000 a month from your affiliate commissions.

Want to know the DIRTY secret about affiliate marketing?

ALL the top affiliate marketers all have built their own mailing lists (usually) from having some of their own products, like ebooks, or whatever. The ebook helps them build a mailing list of qualified leads, within the ebook they have affiliate links, AND they have built an email list they can continue to market to over and over again and sell more affiliate products to.

So you can be a top affiliate but usually you also need to develop your own products…  All the guys making $100k or more a year all have mailing lists. (And the ones who make 1 million or more a year have their own mailing lists to recommend other people's products AND they launch their own products and partner with the other top affiliates.)

The good news is we have an entire video series on using sites like Rent A Coder where you can hire someone to help you create your own special reports, ebooks, etc to help you build your mailing list.  We also have begun a series of videos on how to use Aweber to host your mailing list.

- Ben Fitts 

One thing we are really trying to do at Marketing ICE is teach the exact things we do in our own efforts.  As our members know there are a ton of blogging lessons on Marketing ICE and there is a reason we started there.  Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get started fast, make connections and get links there is.  While we are going to do more and more SEO, Black Hat and Advanced videos we will still keep doing more on blogs and Social Networking.

I wanted to take just a moment to show our members a project I just launched on my personal blog Comtech News.   I won't go into the full details here, you can just read the post called

Top Bloggers - A Call for Guest Posting

to learn all about it.

Basically it is pretty simple though I made a list of my 25 favorite bloggers who talk about business, marketing, internet marketing and sales.  Each has an opportunity to submit a guest post to my blog.  Some are huge name bloggers and some lesser known.  The beauty of this post is

1.  I am seeing some of these big name bloggers on m blog already, getting even a mention from some of them can really do a lot for your blog.

2.  Those who submit a guest post will add unique value to my blog

3.  Some of the lesser known bloggers are now associated with some big names 

4.  I will forge new friendships and relationships 

5.  My readers now will learn about new and really cool blogs

The key to this is I listed 25 bloggers but I am only accepting 15 guest posts.  So those listed have an incentive to claim a spot.  Additionally I did contact any of them directly, I simply put their blog names and proper names in my Technorati Tags and gave them a link.  Many people monitor thier links and own name in Technorati and like Google blog alert.  So I am relying on that to reach my guest bloggers.

So far as I know I am the first person to do something like this.  That makes it also creative and opens up things like Digg and PlugIM on that note if you read the story please consider plugging, bumping or digging it.  There are buttons for that at the bottom if you would like to.

So the bigger lesson here for everyone is about creativity!  Think about the techniques and skills we teach at MarketingICE, everyone is learning the same one, the key is the creativity you bring to the table, what ideas does my project give you or what ideas can you apply to our other training videos?  

Try to think of some creative things you can do that have never been done before.  Many times it is nothing more then using an old concept in a new way.

Again you can read my post about Guest Bloggers at Top Bloggers - A Call for Guest Posting. 

One very important thing to understand though is this, that list I made was not trumped up to get big name folks.  They are all actually blogs I have read for a long time, I find them all to be among the best there are available.  So if you try anything similar to this remember don't do it as a marketing thing only, be genuine.  The internet can seem like a big place but its communities are a lot like a small town.  If you are sincere you will do very well if you try to trump thing up, well, word gets around and fast.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog, social networking, digg, plugim, bumpzee

As we are growing we are getting a lot of questions about Marketing ICE.  Here are a few.

1.  What is the difference between the free and paid memberships.

Answer - Well, there really isn't a "free membership" at all.  We simply understand that our form of interactive creative education is hard to understand with out experiencing it so we have 12 videos that anyone can access with a simple password.  We ask you to join our mailing list for that but it doesn't make you a real "member", you have no userID that way just a password.   You don't get access to our affiliates program, our members only forum or our conference calls or coming MP3 downloads.  You get access to 12 videos and nothing more.

Now paid members get full access to the site and benefits that include

• Access to about 20 hours of video training that is growing
• A members only forum with a thread for every single video lesson
• The ability to request new video subjects
• A great affiliate program and a coming awesome contest
• Site Critiques
• Conference Calls and MP3 Audio Lessons
• More!

It is pretty simple right now we provide this for 19.95 and one benefit to our customers is knowing what others do not.  To keep the value of what we have very high we limit access.  So free members, you are not actually members you just have access to some amazing videos.  Honestly we may be giving away to many videos free and may cut back on that number soon.  Many of our paid members have actually suggested that to us.

2.   Do you have an affiliates program?  and How do I join it?

Answer - Well if you are a paid member you already are an affiliate.  Just log in to your account and click on Affiliate Program to get your affiliate link. There are also some nice banners under promotional tools.  We have been testing the program with some select Joint Venture partners to be sure it tracked accurately and everything worked so we have not really pushed the program yet.  Everything has checked out so feel free to refer others to Marketing ICE.

Some have asked if you have to be a customer to be an affiliate, the answer is yes.  This is to limit the program to affiliates that actually use the product themselves and reduce competition.  It is another benefit of being a paid member.  We currently have no plans to change this policy in any way.

3.  Is there a JV (joint venture) program for people with large mailing lists, etc? 

Answer - Yes we pay a higher JV commission along with some other benefits to JV partners.  A JV partner must have a verifiable large mailing list or be able to organize a teleconference with a minimum attendance of at least 100 people.  We'd love to help you promote our site by hosting a teleseminar or webinar with your list. We have the software to host webinars up to 1000 users and teleseminars up to 250 users. If you can guarantee at least 100 users on the seminar we are more then willing to set you up as a JV.   We do expect JV partners to produce sales so we generaly give a reasonable quota for the first 60 days for our JV's to maintain the higher commissions and other benefits.  

4.  How often will you be adding new videos?

Answer - In the last two weeks we added about 8 new videos for another 3 hours of training.  We try to add a few videos a week and have no plans to change that.  Figure on 4 a week and consider there are about 26 weeks left in the year and we will be adding  over a hundred new videos just this year.  Honestly we may do far more.

The important thing to understand is Marketing ICE will never be a static system.  From the interactive forum to the new videos each week we will aways grow, expand and adapt.  Much of what we produced initially was pretty basic, that was to lay down fundamentals.  We are moving into more and more advanced topics as we go forward.  We will always keep Marketing ICE useful for the new user as well as the most advanced users. 

5.  Do you teach Black Hat Techniques?  If so why?

Answer - Yes and because they work!  Honestly there is a bit of stuff on the site now that is black hat depending on how you define black hat.  We don't do anything illegal and don't teach anything that is illegal either.  Some people think that is black hat it is not.  We don't spam and that is not black hat either.  Black hat is "manipulation of systems to artificially influence the search engine results".  That means when you take any specific actions to try to drive your rank up you are getting into the black hat relm at least the way a pure white hat would define it.

Now those in the know, understand that real black hat is much more systificated then that!  We have as I said in the last question started with a lot of basic fundamentals.  We are going to be adding some real black hat techniques very soon.  Some things like rotational content, rss feed manipulation and more.  The reality is a lot of gurus and experts claim to be white hat, they teach white hat, etc.  Yet any SEO worth the salt in his body knows all the shades of SEO, be they white, gray or black!

Honestly lots of people would prefer that we not teach this stuff, not because it is bad but because it works and they want as few people to know as possible.  Our mission is to make our customers the most successful marketers in the world and we can only do that by telling you everything we know that WORKS.  So white, black, gray, what have you, if it works, we will teach it.

Now we will tell you when we are showing you a real black technique (not that it will be hard to tell).  Black hat is like a gun , it is a tool, it works and at times there is nothing better for the job at hand.  However, like a gun you can hurt yourself with out proper training and safety.  So we will teach you black hat techniques and how to mitigate the risks as well.

If you have any additional questions just post them here, we are happy to answer them.  However, it will be Ben and Mark answering for the next week because I am taking a well earned week at my vacation home in Hot Springs Arkansas.  A full week with no internet access!

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: seo, blackhat, black hat, seo blackhat, marketingice, internet marketing, arkansas, jack spirko, affiliate programs, affiliate marketing

About a year ago I heard about a social bookmark site called Diigo.  I saw it as another Delicious clone but figured I would look at it a bit deeper it just seemed to be more.  It was a good decision!

Since that time I have been using Diigo and their tool bar every day.   I use it to keep sites I want to find very easy to find and sort and search.  I use it to market my own sites and to put my sites into all the other top book mark sites including delicious.  I also use it to improve my daily productivity and the beauty is once set up it takes up no extra time to use it.  It becomes seamlessly integrated into your daily efforts.

I just did three training Videos on Diigo for our paying members, they are called,

• Social Bookmarking With The Diigo Tool Bar 
• Using Diigo To Mass Social Bookmark Web Sites
• Cool Marketing Productivity Features With Diigo

If you don't know about social book mark sites these videos will teach you what you need to know.  If you do know about them then these videos will take your efforts to a new level.  The social bookmark sites are going to become the Google, Yahoo and Ask.com's of tomorrow so now the time to get into them and build up your presence.

These videos add another 45 minutes of training to Marketing ICE, Mark Barrera just uploaded a few more as well.  We are continuing to grow and get better, remember we make videos based on your needs, if there is any subject you want to see let us know, just comment on the blog or in the members forum. 

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: diigo, delicious, del.icou.us, social bookmarks, social bookmarking, social networking, social media, seo, sem, internet marketing

We have been getting some questions on how to get more traffic to your blog.

One of the biggest advantages I mention in my video, why blogs are sometimes better than web sites, is that blogs include rss feeds.  The purpose of an rss feed is to allow people to subscribe to your blog so that they can get automatically updated when you have something new to write about on your blog.

Another great element of rss feeds is that there are a lot of blog oriented web directories and search engines.  Some of them allow people to compile their own "news paper" that contains the latest articles from the blogs they like.  You can submit your rss feed to these directories because they want to compile as many blogs as they can to entice users to come back to their web site.

It's almost like the internet in the 90s when people like Yahoo allowed you to list your site for free instead of paying for it.  They wanted to build Yahoo into a super search engine so you could list your site for free, where now you have to pay $300 or more to get your site listed.

With blogs you can submit your blog or your blog's rss feeds to tons of free sites. So I just spent the last hour or so compiling a list of sites where you can submit your blog

 Submit rss feeds to these 74 blog directories and search engines.

If you have any new sites you want to add or if you have questions, please let me know!

 - Ben Fitts 

I spent this weekend working on something we needed to have for our members of Marketing ICE.  Good sites have certain fundamentals done properly, the fundamentals are the core of your success or your failure.  There are many of these fundamentals that you need to be aware of.  Some are good copy, good lead capture, etc but one that gets over looked is the basics of on page Search Engine Optimization.

With changes over the past 2 years links have become all the rage.  Specifically one way links to your site and pages and they are with out a doubt the most important ranking factor in today's Search Marketing world.  

The problem is that has led to people just forgetting about good on page optmization techniques.  These are things like Key Word Densitites, Tags, Word Placement, Internal Link Structure and ton of other thigns.  The beauty is once you know what to do and how to do these techniques they add only a few minutes of time to the creation of each page and the long term benifits go on for years and years.

Take Title and Description tags as one example.  Even some professional marketers just don't bother to think about them any longer simply because they only have a moderate to weak effect on ranking.  However, THEY ARE DISPLAYED in the search engine results!  Think about this, you work hard, you get your term ranked say number 4 on Google and you are happy.

Do you realize that is only half the battle?  In many instances there are about 20 people on that page (paid and organic combined) and you are first competiting to get on the page then you have to get clicked.  Lets say you get ranked in the top five for a term with 50,000 searches.  If your listing gets clicked 5% of the time you get 2500 visitors that month.  If you get clicked on say 15% of the time you get 7500.  

You don't have to be a genius to understand one is a lot better then the other.  Well, it just so happens that the title and description tags are the most important factors (other then over all rank) that effect your click through precentage on a Search Engine listing.

So how can anyone ignore this?  Can you afford to just not worry about this?  How about the other key on page factors?  All of them together still have a massive over all effect on your rankings when used in combination.  You simply have to get the right and make them standard practice for every page you ever build.

I just did about 40 minutes of training on these factors for our paying members.  This is really one big lesson but I had to break it into three videos.  The videos are,

• Video One - Meta, Description and Title Tagging
• Video Two - Alt Image, Link Title and Heading Tags
• Video Three -  Internal Link Power, Key Word Density and Placement

Honestly these three videos alone are worth more then a full month membership to Marketing ICE by themselves.  If you learn these techniques and always apply them going forward over time they will pay dividends far beyound the small ammount of time it takes to insure they are being used properly. 

For our paying members you will want to watch these videos and start using these techniques right away.  For free members this is just one more reason to upgrade.  To upgrade to all access just Join Marketing ICE.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, on page, on site, search marketing, marketing ice, jack spirko

OK, Beta members I want to tell you that Beta is about to end.  Huge changes are comming and we are planning a live launch on Thursday with awesome new pricing I can't tell you about yet.  Paying Beta members are also about to get a huge surprise!  But I can't tell you about that either just that if you are a paying member you are going to be ecstatic about them!

What I can tell you is I am about to put several thousand people into the ICE System in the next two weeks (being conservative) and all of them will be taken to a sales page about the Marketing ICE System.

On that page I want testominals from our members, paid or free!

This will give you exposure to all our new visitors and members, remember we are talking thousands.  In your testominal you can add a link to any one of your websites you want.  Your testimonial should be positive in tone and tell others how valuable the training we offer is.  You should also send me a picture of you if you have one.  I may clean up and edit or shorten your testimonial if it is to long but I won't put any words in your mouth.  I will then put your link under your signature to any web site you want.

I know this is short notice but if you want a testimonial of yours on our sales pages get them to me ASAP.  Send me your testimonial, your picture (if you have one) and the site you want a link to right away and I will try to get you included on the sales page by Thursday night.  (email me at jack @ marketingice.com)

Again some huge changes are about to happen, lots of new videos, easier to navigate and find what you are looking for and one of the best affiliate programs ever created and special recorded coaching calls, just to name a few. Stay Tuned!

~ Jack Spirko 

I'm pleased to say that big changes to Marketing ICE are coming soon!

We've been listening to our members and we're going to make the site a lot better.  I know I've been saying this for a couple of weeks but one of the reasons it has taken so long is because I've been doing some work on the "back end".  I've been working on the system that allows us to upload our tutorials.  This system has been taking up a lot of my time, but now that it is ready, we can add videos much faster than we used to.

We've also got some more announcements on pricing and memberships, but we're not ready to announce those yet :)  We'll have a conference call soon to discuss all the changes.

Thank you to all of you who have provided feedback on the site so far.  We're very happy that many of you have found the videos to be helpful.  We've got MORE videos coming soon.  I think I have about 10 to add already!

We'll announce more soon, I promise.

- Ben 

One of our Beta Members (Heidi Caswell) asked an awesome question about how to add meta keyword tags and description tags to WordPress.  In response I put together a cool new video about a plugin that allows you to do just that.

The video is called you guessed it, Adding Description And Keyword Meta Tags To Wordpress Postings

Keep in mind we try to do videos based on want our members what to learn.  So send us your feedback, tell us what you want to see next, post a comment below and we will do all we can to get it in the project line up.

We also have a ton of cool new videos coming and some really exciting announcements coming including a way anyone is going to be able to afford full access to our members area, you will have to stay tuned to learn about that soon.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: video, wordpress, meta tags, plugin, wordpress plugin, description tag, plugins, blogging, blog, seo, sem, blog seo

For those of you who are doing some type of PR for your site, getting into Google News can be a great source of publicity, branding, and traffic.

If you want to find a sure way to get your news into Google News, check out the video I did on this topic. 

Also, check out this post from Danny Sullivan if you want to see how valuable showing in Google News can be.